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Tom Mould - Review of Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl, If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America

Tom Mould - Review of Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl, If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America


Photograph of a dark forest with a silhouette standing in the light

If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America offers an excellent one-stop-shopping option for readers new to the concept of legend tripping, as well as valuable new contributions for seasoned legend scholars. Jeffrey Debies-Carl is a sociologist but he takes folklore scholarship seriously and centers much of his work around folklore theory and methodology while also engaging scholarship from his own disciplinary field, as well as that of psychology, anthropology, and religious studies. Packed with hundreds of legends, memorates, and legends trips, the book offers vivid support for Debies-Carl’s interpretations, ensuring the book is engaging and entertaining as well as thought-provoking.

If You Should Go at Midnight is structured according to a rite of passage—separation, transition, and reintegration—but with two distinct stages within each, all organized around the liminal. In the pre-liminal or separation stage, Debies-Carl explores the initial legend narration, followed by the preparation and journey to the legend site. In the liminal or transition stage, we see the legend trippers engage in the rituals prescribed by the legend, followed by the results of those rites: ideally an experience mirroring expectations established in the initial narration of the legend and its accompanying secondhand and personal experience narratives. Finally, in the post-liminal or reintegration stage, legend trippers flee the space, return safely, and then create the story of their experience, a process of shared interpretation that ensures the cycle of legend tripping continues.

The structure is a useful one, even though Debies-Carl himself argues that legend tripping does not align neatly with traditional rites of passage organized and sanctioned by authorities, elders, or officials, where the meaning of the rite and the transition into a new social role is clear and widely recognized within the group. Broadly speaking, this is true, but Debies-Carl too quickly dismisses the fact that legend trips are often led by someone who has already “transitioned” by having already participated in the particular legend trip. As such, they serve as the “elders” of the group, the ones who often initiate the storytelling, organize the trip, and lead the new group of uninitiated to the site to move through the rite of passage themselves. Lack of institutional authority does not equal lack of any authority, as recent research into lay and vernacular knowledge, epistemologies, and authorities have made abundantly clear.

In the larger scope of the work, this is a small complaint but one indicative of a perplexing shortcoming of the book: lack of fieldwork with legend trippers. Debies-Carl has gone to great lengths to ensure a multimodal methodological approach to triangulate his findings. He has conducted a wide review of the literature, combed the archives for student projects on legend tripping, reviewed TV and the internet for new mediated forms of legend tripping on popular ghost hunting shows and among aficionados of the paranormal, and importantly, conducted his own, solitary legend tripping to visit the sites he is writing about. Yet he assumes he could not do fieldwork that would allow him to accompany legend goers and document the event firsthand or to interview current legend trippers. He chooses instead to read the landscape as an archaeologist, a useful and productive approach if one’s participants are long dead, but not if they are alive and well and still legend tripping.

Fortunately, Debies-Carl draws on literature from folklorists who have done this fieldwork—though many of the studies are over half a century old—and the lack of one data point should by no means detract from the excellent work that is here. And there is a lot. In addition to the new media he explores and the careful review of previous scholarship and archival data, Debies-Carl offers productive approaches to key concepts involved in legend tripping. Notable among them is his introductory chapter on ostension, a term defined in dramatically different ways across the humanities and social sciences, as well as among folklorists and legend scholars. He offers one of the most thorough discussions of ostension to date, one that is a helpful contribution for anyone trying to unravel the term and test its efficacy. He also expands discussions of common functions of legend tripping and legend telling to consider how we can predict the next legend cycle based on changing social concerns. Just as the struggle for civil rights can be tied to legend tripping at haunted plantations, and the defunding of mental health care can be linked to haunted asylums, so too may animal rights advocacy lead to legend tripping at haunted slaughterhouses and animal-testing facilities.

Debies-Carl covers significant ground throughout each chapter, including a number of issues that continue to raise productive questions and new lines of inquiry in legend tripping. Sampling from each chapter, readers are engaged in discussions about the fragmentary and incomplete nature of legends (chapter 3), the possibility of legend tripping without a legend (chapter 4), the extensive range of predispositions and expectations that can lead to an “availability heuristic” (chapter 5), the ambiguity of whether the numinous adheres to the boundaries of a rite of passage (chapter 6), the impacts of new technologies and media on processes of proving one’s experience (chapter 7), and the evolving world of “professional experts” and “quasi-institutional authorities” and their intersections with religion and tourism (chapter 8).

Although he leans heavily on the culture-source-theory side of interpretation rather than an experience-source one as developed by David Hufford, Debies-Carl usefully contextualizes this debate within sociological research that has worked towards similar ends. In doing so, he helps put folklorists in productive dialogue with related scholars and vice versa, a goal folklorists have been eager to achieve since the beginning of the discipline. As such, If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America serves as a model for the kind of interdisciplinary work we need in order to bring folklore into greater prominence in both academic and public arenas. Folklorists have been drawing on sociological, anthropological, psychological, and linguistic studies for years; it is nice to see some movement in the other direction as well.

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[Review length: 1006 words • Review posted on November 22, 2024]